“Nobody we know?” I asked.
“Gloria Dayton called from Twin Towers.”
I groaned. The Twin Towers was the county’s main lockup in downtown. It housed women in one tower and men in the other. Gloria Dayton was a high-priced prostitute who needed my legal services from time to time. The first time I represented her was at least ten years earlier, when she was young and drug-free and still had life in her eyes. Now she was a pro bono client. I never charged her. I just tried to convince her to quit the life.
“When did she get popped?”
“Last night. Or rather, this morning. Her first appearance is after lunch.”
“I don’t know if I can make that with this Van Nuys thing.”
“There’s also a complication. Cocaine possession as well as the usual.”
I knew that Gloria worked exclusively through contacts made on the Internet, where she billed herself on a variety of websites as Glory Days. She was no streetwalker or barroom troller. When she got popped, it was usually after an undercover vice officer was able to penetrate her check system and set up a date. The fact that she had cocaine on her person when they met sounded like an unusual lapse on her part or a plant from the cop.
“All right, if she calls back tell her I will try to be there and if I’m not there I will have somebody take it. Will you call the court and firm up the hearing?”
“I’m on it. But, Mickey, when are you going to tell her this is the last time?”
“I don’t know. Maybe today. What else?”
“Isn’t that enough for one day?”
“It’ll do, I guess.”
We talked a little more about my schedule for the rest of the week and I opened my laptop on the fold-down table so I could check my calendar against hers. I had a couple hearings set for each morning and a one-day trial on Thursday. It was all South side drug stuff. My meat and potatoes. At the end of the conversation I told her that I would call her after the Van Nuys hearing to let her know if and how the Roulet case would impact things.
“One last thing,” I said. “You said the place Roulet works handles pretty exclusive real estate deals, right?”
“Yeah. Every deal his name was attached to in the archives was in seven figures. A couple got up into the eights. Holmby Hills, Bel-Air, places like that.”
I nodded, thinking that Roulet’s status might make him a person of interest to the media.
“Then why don’t you tip Sticks to it,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, we might be able to work something there.”
“Will do.”
“Talk to you later.”
By the time I closed the phone, Earl had us back on the Antelope Valley Freeway heading south. We were making good time and getting to Van Nuys for Roulet’s first appearance wasn’t going to be a problem. I called Fernando Valenzuela to tell him.
“That’s real good,” the bondsman said. “I’ll be waiting.”
As he spoke I watched two motorcycles glide by my window. Each rider wore a black leather vest with the skull and halo patch sewn on the back.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yeah, one other thing I should probably tell you,” Valenzuela said. “I was double-checking with the court on when his first appearance was going to be and I found out the case was assigned to Maggie McFierce. I don’t know if that’s going to be a problem for you or not.”
Maggie McFierce as in Margaret McPherson, who happened to be one of the toughest and, yes, fiercest deputy district attorneys assigned to the Van Nuys courthouse. She also happened to be my first ex-wife.
“It won’t be a problem for me,” I said without hesitation. “She’s the one who’ll have the problem.”
The defendant has the right to his choice of counsel. If there is a conflict of interest between the defense lawyer and the prosecutor, then it is the prosecutor who must bow out. I knew Maggie would hold me personally responsible for her losing the reins on what might be a big case but I couldn’t help that. It had happened before. In my laptop I still had a motion to disqualify from the last case in which we had crossed paths. If necessary, I would just have to change the name of the defendant and print it out. I’d be good to go and she’d be as good as gone.
The two motorcycles had now moved in front of us. I turned and looked out the back window. There were three more Harleys behind us.
“You know what that means, though,” I said.
“No, what?”
“She’ll go for no bail. She always does with crimes against women.”
“Shit, can she get it? I’m looking at a nice chunk of change on this, man.”
“I don’t know. You said the guy’s got family and C. C. Dobbs. I can make something out of that. We’ll see.”
“Shit.”
Valenzuela was seeing his major payday disappear.
“I’ll see you there, Val.”
I closed the phone and looked over the seat at Earl.
“How long have we had the escort?” I asked.
“Just came up on us,” Earl said. “You want me to do something?”
“Let’s see what they -”
I didn’t have to wait until the end of my sentence. One of the riders from the rear came up alongside the Lincoln and signaled us toward the upcoming exit for the Vasquez Rocks County Park. I recognized him as Teddy Vogel, a former client and the highest-ranked Road Saint not incarcerated. He might have been the largest Saint as well. He went at least 350 pounds and he gave the impression of a fat kid riding his little brother’s bike.
“Pull off, Earl,” I said. “Let’s see what he’s got.”
We pulled into the parking lot next to the jagged rock formation named after an outlaw who had hid in them a century before. I saw two people sitting and having a picnic on the edge of one of the highest ledges. I didn’t think I would feel comfortable eating a sandwich in such a dangerous spot and position.
I lowered my window as Teddy Vogel approached on foot. The other four Saints had killed their engines but remained on their bikes. Vogel leaned down to the window and put one of his giant forearms on the sill. I could feel the car tilt down a few inches.
“Counselor, how’s it hanging?” he said.
“Just fine, Ted,” I said, not wanting to call him by his obvious gang sobriquet of Teddy Bear. “What’s up with you?”
“What happened to the ponytail?”
“Some people objected to it, so I cut it off.”
“A jury, huh? Must’ve been a collection of stiffs from up this way.”
“What’s up, Ted?”
“I got a call from Hard Case over there in the Lancaster pen. He said I might catch you heading south. Said you were stalling his case till you got some green. That right, Counselor?”
It was said as routine conversation. No threat in his voice or words. And I didn’t feel threatened. Two years ago I got an abduction and aggravated assault case against Vogel knocked down to a disturbing the peace. He ran a Saints-owned strip club on Sepulveda in Van Nuys. His arrest came after he learned that one of his most productive dancers had quit and crossed the street to work at a competing club. Vogel had crossed the street after her, grabbed her off the stage and carried her back to his club. She was naked. A passing motorist called the police. Knocking the case down was one of my better plays and Vogel knew this. He had a soft spot for me.
“He’s pretty much got it right,” I said. “I work for a living. If he wants me to work for him he’s gotta pay me.”
“We gave you five grand in December,” Vogel said.
“That’s long gone, Ted. More than half went to the expert who is going to blow the case up. The rest went to me and I already worked off those hours. If I’m going to take it to trial, then I need to refill the tank.”
“You want another five?”
“No, I need ten and I told Hard Case that last week. It’s a three-day trial and I’ll need to bring my expert in from Kodak in New York. I’ve got his fee to cover and he wants first class in the air and the Chateau Marmont on the ground. Thinks he’s going to be drinking at the bar with movie stars or something. That place is four hundred a night just for the cheap rooms.”
“You’re killing me, Counselor. Whatever happened to that slogan you had in the yellow pages? ‘Reasonable doubt for a reasonable fee.’ You call ten grand reasonable?”
“I liked that slogan. It brought in a lot of clients. But the California bar wasn’t so pleased with it, made me get rid of it. Ten is the price and it is reasonable, Ted. If you can’t or don’t want to pay it, I’ll file the paperwork today. I’ll drop out and he can go with a PD. I’ll turn everything I have over. But the PD probably won’t have the budget to fly in the photo expert.”
Vogel shifted his position on the window sill and the car shuddered under the weight.
“No, no, we want you. Hard Case is important to us, you know what I mean? I want him out and back to work.”
I watched him reach inside his vest with a hand that was so fleshy that the knuckles were indented. It came out with a thick envelope that he passed into the car to me.
“Is this cash?” I asked.
“That’s right. What’s wrong with cash?”
“Nothing. But I have to give you a receipt. It’s an IRS reporting requirement. This is the whole ten?”
“It’s all there.”
I took the top off of a cardboard file box I keep on the seat next to me. My receipt book was behind the current case files. I started writing out the receipt. Most lawyers who get disbarred go down because of financial violations. The mishandling or misappropriation of client fees. I kept meticulous records and receipts. I would never let the bar get to me that way.
“So you had it all along,” I said as I wrote. “What if I had backed down to five? What would you have done then?”
Vogel smiled. He was missing one of his front teeth on the bottom. Had to have been a fight at the club. He patted the other side of his vest.
“I got another envelope with five in it right here, Counselor,” he said. “I was ready for you.”
“Damn, now I feel bad, leaving you with money in your pocket.”
I tore out his copy of the receipt and handed it out the window.
“I receipted it to Casey. He’s the client.”
“Fine with me.”
He took the receipt and dropped his arm off the window sill as he stood up straight. The car returned to a normal level. I wanted to ask him where the money came from, which of the Saints’ criminal enterprises had earned it, whether a hundred girls had danced a hundred hours for him to pay me, but that was a question I was better off not knowing the answer to. I watched Vogel saunter back to his Harley and struggle to swing a trash can-thick leg over the seat. For the first time I noticed the double shocks on the back wheel. I told Earl to get back on the freeway and get going to Van Nuys, where I now needed to make a stop at the bank before hitting the courthouse to meet my new client.
As we drove I opened the envelope and counted out the money, twenties, fifties and hundred-dollar bills. It was all there. The tank was refilled and I was good to go with Harold Casey. I would go to trial and teach his young prosecutor a lesson. I would win, if not in trial, then certainly on appeal. Casey would return to the family and work of the Road Saints. His guilt in the crime he was charged with was not something I even considered as I filled out a deposit slip for my client fees account.
“Mr. Haller?” Earl said after a while.
“What, Earl?”
“That man you told him was coming in from New York to be the expert? Will I be picking him up at the airport?”
I shook my head.
“There is no expert coming in from New York, Earl. The best camera and photo experts in the world are right here in Hollywood.”
Now Earl nodded and his eyes held mine for a moment in the rearview mirror. Then he looked back at the road ahead.
“I see,” he said, nodding again.
And I nodded to myself. No hesitation in what I had done or said. That was my job. That was how it worked. After fifteen years of practicing law I had come to think of it in very simple terms. The law was a large, rusting machine that sucked up people and lives and money. I was just a mechanic. I had become expert at going into the machine and fixing things and extracting what I needed from it in return.
There was nothing about the law that I cherished anymore. The law school notions about the virtue of the adversarial system, of the system’s checks and balances, of the search for truth, had long since eroded like the faces of statues from other civilizations. The law was not about truth. It was about negotiation, amelioration, manipulation. I didn’t deal in guilt and innocence, because everybody was guilty. Of something. But it didn’t matter, because every case I took on was a house built on a foundation poured by overworked and underpaid laborers. They cut corners. They made mistakes. And then they painted over the mistakes with lies. My job was to peel away the paint and find the cracks. To work my fingers and tools into those cracks and widen them. To make them so big that either the house fell down or, failing that, my client slipped through.
Much of society thought of me as the devil but they were wrong. I was a greasy angel. I was the true road saint. I was needed and wanted. By both sides. I was the oil in the machine. I allowed the gears to crank and turn. I helped keep the engine of the system running.
But all of that would change with the Roulet case. For me. For him. And certainly for Jesus Menendez.
FOUR
Louis Ross Roulet was in a holding tank with seven other men who had made the half-block bus ride from the Van Nuys jail to the Van Nuys courthouse. There were only two white men in the cell and they sat next to each other on a bench while the six black men took the other side of the cell. It was a form of Darwinian segregation. They were all strangers but there was strength in numbers.
Since Roulet supposedly came from Beverly Hills money, I looked at the two white men and it was easy to choose between them. One was rail thin with the desperate wet eyes of a hype who was long past fix time. The other looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights. I chose him.
“Mr. Roulet?” I said, pronouncing the name the way Valenzuela had told me to.
The deer nodded. I signaled him over to the bars so I could talk quietly.
“My name is Michael Haller. People call me Mickey. I will be representing you during your first appearance today.”
We were in the holding area behind the arraignment court, where attorneys are routinely allowed access to confer with clients before court begins. There is a blue line painted on the floor outside the cells. The three-foot line. I had to keep that distance from my client.
Roulet grasped the bars in front of me. Like the others in the cage, he had on ankle, wrist and belly chains. They wouldn’t come off until he was taken into the courtroom. He was in his early thirties and, though at least six feet tall and 180 pounds, he seemed slight. Jail will do that to you. His eyes were pale blue and it was rare for me to see the kind of panic that was so clearly set in them. Most of the time my clients have been in lockup before and they have the stone-cold look of the predator. It’s how they get by in jail.
But Roulet was different. He looked like prey. He was scared and he didn’t care who saw it and knew it.
“This is a setup,” he said urgently and loudly. “You have to get me out of here. I made a mistake with that woman, that’s all. She’s trying to set me up and -”
I put my hands up to stop him.
“Be careful what you say in here,” I said in a low voice. “In fact, be careful what you say until we get you out of here and can talk in private.”
He looked around, seemingly not understanding.
“You never know who is listening,” I said. “And you never know who will say he heard you say something, even if you didn’t say anything. Best thing is to not talk about the case at all. You understand? Best thing is not to talk to anyone about anything, period.”
He nodded and I signaled him down to the bench next to the bars. There was a bench against the opposite wall and I sat down.
“I am really here just to meet you and tell you who I am,” I said. “We’ll talk about the case after we get you out. I already spoke to your family lawyer, Mr. Dobbs, out there and we will tell the judge that we are prepared to post bail. Do I have all of that right?”
I opened a leather Mont Blanc folder and prepared to take notes on a legal pad. Roulet nodded. He was learning.
“Good,” I said. “Tell me about yourself. How old you are, whether you’re married, what ties you have to the community.”
“Um, I’m thirty-two. I’ve lived here my whole life-even went to school here. UCLA. Not married. No kids. I work -”
“Divorced?”
“No, never married. I work for my family’s business. Windsor Residential Estates. It’s named after my mother’s second husband. It’s real estate. We sell real estate.”
I was writing notes. Without looking up at him, I quietly asked, “How much money did you make last year?”
When Roulet didn’t answer I looked up at him.
“Why do you need to know that?” he asked.
“Because I am going to get you out of here before the sun goes down today. To do that, I need to know everything about your standing in the community. That includes your financial standing.”
“I don’t know exactly what I made. A lot of it was shares in the company.”
“You didn’t file taxes?”
Roulet looked over his shoulder at the others in the cell and then whispered his answer.
“Yes, I did. On that my income was a quarter million.”
“But what you’re saying is that with the shares you earned in the company you really made more.”
“Right.”
One of Roulet’s cellmates came up to the bars next to him. The other white man. He had an agitated manner, his hands in constant motion, moving from hips to pockets to each other in desperate grasps.
“Hey, man, I need a lawyer, too. You got a card?”
“Not for you, pal. They’ll have a lawyer out there for you.”
I looked back at Roulet and waited a moment for the hype to move away. He didn’t. I looked back at him.
“Look, this is private. Could you leave us alone?”
The hype made some kind of motion with his hands and shuffled back to the corner he had come from. I looked back at Roulet.
“What about charitable organizations?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Roulet responded.
“Are you involved in any charities? Do you give to any charities?”
“Yeah, the company does. We give to Make a Wish and a runaway shelter in Hollywood. I think it’s called My Friend’s Place or something like that.”
“Okay, good.”
“Are you going to get me out?”
“I’m going to try. You’ve got some heavy charges on you-I checked before coming back here-and I have a feeling the DA is going to request no bail, but this is good stuff. I can work with it.”
I indicated my notes.
“No bail?” he said in a loud, panicked voice.
The others in the cell looked in his direction because what he had said was their collective nightmare. No bail.
“Calm down,” I said. “I said that is what she is going to go for. I didn’t say she would get it. When was the last time you were arrested?”
I always threw that in out of the blue so I could watch their eyes and see if there was going to be a surprise thrown at me in court.
“Never. I’ve never been arrested. This whole thing is -”
“I know, I know, but we don’t want to talk about that here, remember?”
He nodded. I looked at my watch. Court was about to start and I still needed to talk to Maggie McFierce.
“I’m going to go now,” I said. “I’ll see you out there in a few minutes and we’ll see about getting you out of here. When we are out there, don’t say anything until you check with me. If the judge asks you how you are doing, you check with me. Okay?”
“Well, don’t I say ‘not guilty’ to the charges?”
“No, they’re not going to even ask you that. Today all they do is read you the charges, talk about bail and set a date for an arraignment. That’s when we say ‘not guilty.’ So today you say nothing. No outbursts, nothing. Got that?”
He nodded and frowned.
“Are you going to be all right, Louis?”
He nodded glumly.
“Just so you know,” I said. “I charge twenty-five hundred dollars for a first appearance and bail hearing like this. Is that going to be a problem?”
He shook his head no. I liked that he wasn’t talking. Most of my clients talk way too much. Usually they talk themselves right into prison.
“Good. We can talk about the rest of it after you are out of here and we can get together in private.”
I closed my leather folder, hoping he had noticed it and was impressed, then stood up.
“One last thing,” I said. “Why’d you pick me? There’s a lot of lawyers out there, why me?”
It was a question that didn’t matter to our relationship but I wanted to test Valenzuela’s veracity.
Roulet shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I remembered your name from something I read in the paper.”
“What did you read about me?”
“It was a story about a case where the evidence got thrown out against some guy. I think it was drugs or something. You won the case because they had no evidence after that.”
“The Hendricks case?”
It was the only one I could think of that had made the papers in recent months. Hendricks was another Road Saint client and the sheriff’s department had put a GPS bug on his Harley to track his deliveries. Doing that on public roads was fine. But when he parked his bike in the kitchen of his home at night, that bug constituted unlawful entry by the cops. The case was tossed by a judge during the preliminary hearing. It made a decent splash in the Times.
“I can’t remember the name of the client,” Roulet said. “I just remembered your name. Your last name, actually. When I called the bail bondsman today I gave him the name Haller and asked him to get you and to call my own attorney. Why?”
“No reason. Just curious. I appreciate the call. I’ll see you in the courtroom.”
I put the differences between what Roulet had said about my hiring and what Valenzuela had told me into the bank for later consideration and made my way back into the arraignment court. I saw Maggie McFierce sitting at one end of the prosecution table. She was there along with five other prosecutors. The table was large and L-shaped so it could accommodate an endlessly revolving number of lawyers who could sit and still face the bench. A prosecutor assigned to the courtroom handled most of the routine appearances and arraignments that were paraded through each day. But special cases brought the big guns out of the district attorney’s office on the second floor of the courthouse next door. TV cameras did that, too.
As I stepped through the bar I saw a man setting up a video camera on a tripod next to the bailiff’s desk. There was no network symbol on the camera or the man’s clothes. The man was a freelancer who had gotten wind of the case and would shoot the hearing and then try to sell it to one of the local stations whose news director needed a thirty-second story. When I had checked with the bailiff earlier about Roulet’s place on the calendar, he told me the judge had already authorized the filming.
I walked up to my ex-wife from behind and bent down to whisper into her ear. She was looking at photographs in a file. She was wearing a navy suit with a thin gray stripe. Her raven-colored hair was tied back with a matching gray ribbon. I loved her hair when it was back like that.
“Are you the one who used to have the Roulet case?”
She looked up, not recognizing the whisper. Her face was involuntarily forming a smile but then it turned into a frown when she saw it was me. She knew exactly what I had meant by using the past tense and she slapped the file closed.
“Don’t tell me,” she said.
“Sorry. He liked what I did on Hendricks and gave me a call.”
“Son of a bitch. I wanted this case, Haller. This is the second time you’ve done this to me.”
“I guess this town ain’t big enough for the both of us,” I said in a poor Cagney imitation.
She groaned.
“All right,” she said in quick surrender. “I’ll go peacefully after this hearing. Unless you object to even that.”
“I might. You going for a no-bail hold?”
“That’s right. But that won’t change with the prosecutor. That was a directive from the second floor.”
I nodded. That meant a case supervisor must have called for the no-bail hold.
“He’s connected in the community. And has never been arrested.”
I studied her reaction, not having had the time to make sure Roulet’s denial of ever being previously arrested was the truth. It’s always amazing how many clients lie about previous engagements with the machine, when it is a lie that has no hope of going the distance.
But Maggie gave no indication that she knew otherwise. Maybe it was true. Maybe I had an honest-to-goodness first-time offender for a client.
“It doesn’t matter whether he’s done anything before,” Maggie said. “What matters is what he did last night.”
She opened the file and quickly checked through the photos until she saw the one she liked and snatched it out.
“Here’s what your pillar of the community did last night. So I don’t really care what he did before. I’m just going to make sure he doesn’t get out to do this again.”
The photo was an 8 X 10 close-up of a woman’s face. The swelling around the right eye was so extensive that the eye was completely and tightly closed. The nose was broken and pushed off center. Blood-soaked gauze protruded from each nostril. There was a deep gash over the right eyebrow that had been closed with nine butterfly stitches. The lower lip was cut and had a marble-size swelling as well. The worst thing about the photo was the eye that was undamaged. The woman looked at the camera with fear, pain and humiliation undeniably expressed in that one tearful eye.
“If he did it,” I said, because that is what I would be expected to say.
“Right,” Maggie said. “Sure, if he did it. He was only arrested in her home with her blood on him, but you’re right, that’s a valid question.”
“I like it when you’re sarcastic. Do you have the arrest report there? I’d like to get a copy of it.”
“You can get it from whoever takes the case over from me. No favors, Haller. Not this time.”
I waited, expecting more banter, more indignation, maybe another shot across the bow, but that was all she said. I decided that getting more out of her on the case was a lost cause. I changed the subject.
“So,” I said. “How is she?”
“She’s scared shitless and hurting like hell. How else would she be?”
She looked up at me and I saw the immediate recognition and then judgment in her eyes.
“You weren’t even asking about the victim, were you?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to lie to her.
“Your daughter is doing fine,” she said perfunctorily. “She likes the things you send her but she would rather you show up a little more often.”
That wasn’t a shot across the bow. That was a direct hit and it was deserved. It seemed as though I was always chasing cases, even on weekends. Deep down inside I knew I needed to start chasing my daughter around the backyard more often. The time to do it was going by.
“I will,” I said. “Starting right now. What about this weekend?”
“Fine. You want me to tell her tonight?”
“Uh, maybe wait until tomorrow so I know for sure.”
She gave me one of those knowing nods. We had been through this before.
“Great. Let me know tomorrow.”
This time I didn’t enjoy the sarcasm.
“What does she need?” I asked, trying to stumble back to just being even.
“I just told you what she needs. More of you in her life.”
“Okay, I promise. I will do that.”
She didn’t respond.
“I really mean that, Maggie. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
She looked up at me and was ready to hit me with both barrels. She had done it before, saying I was all talk and no action when it came to fatherhood. But I was saved by the start of the court session. The judge came out of chambers and bounded up the steps to the bench. The bailiff called the courtroom to order. Without another word to Maggie I left the prosecution table and went back to one of the seats along the bar.
The judge asked his clerk if there was any business to be discussed before the custodies were brought out. There was none, so the judge ordered the first group out. As with the courtroom in Lancaster, there was a large holding area for in-custody defendants. I got up and moved to the opening in the glass. When I saw Roulet come through the door I signaled him over.
“You’re going first,” I told him. “I asked the judge to take you out of order as a favor. I want to try to get you out of here.”
This was not the truth. I hadn’t asked the judge anything, and even if I had, the judge would do no such thing for me as a favor. Roulet was going first because of the media presence in the courtroom. It was a general practice to deal with the media cases first. This was a courtesy to the cameramen who supposedly had other assignments to get to. But it also made for less tension in the courtroom when lawyers, defendants and even the judge could operate without a television camera on them.
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